The Abstracted Self in Arabic Poetry

Abstract

Whatever must be accepted from new insights in the nature of collective and oral composition, and the concomitant shakiness of the status of 'the poet', there can be no doubt that the poet himself, or rather his 'lyrical I' is very much present in classical Arabic poems. In almost every poem, and certainly every nasFb, the poet speaks himself, or about himself, or even to himself; although his persona usually speaks in a somewhat impersonal way.-I hasten to make the necessary distinction between, on the one hand, the personae in the poem (the Poet, the Beloved, the Companions, the Mamdiih and others), and, on the other, the persons in the situational context of the poem (the poet, the beloved, the mamdiTh, or whoever). Several scholars have studied this poetic voice and the way the poet sees himself in the world. I only mention Von Grunebaum's Wirklichkeitweite of 1937, which contains a long chapter entitled 'Das Ich und seine menschliche Beziehungsfihigkeit',' and more recently Jaroslav Stetkevych's 'The Arabic Lyrical Phenomenon in Context' of 1975.2 There is one small thing about the poet's persona that has often been observed, to which I would like to draw attention once more: it is the fact that the poets very regularly and often confusingly do not only speak for themselves but to and about themselves as well. In itself, this is not typical of Arabic poetry; I suppose that poets have addressed themselves in any literature. For instance, in western literature we find, according to Curtius from late antiquity onwards, poets invoking themselves or their own souls instead of the Muses.3 Shakespeare addresses his 'Pour soul, the centre of my sinful earth'; Yeats wrote 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul'. But early Arabic poetry is distinguished by the frequency of its occurrence as well as by the sudden shifts. A shift, for instance, from second to first person singular in consecutive lines is extremely common, and not rarely one poem contains an erratic sequence of several of these shifts. For example, Imra' al-Qays's mu'allaqa begins in the first person